Mail-in voting is rigged

What we know

Mail-in and absentee voting has been used in U.S. elections since the Civil War, when it was first implemented to allow soldiers stationed away from home to vote. Five states, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Hawaii, and Utah, currently conduct nearly all of their elections entirely by mail, and none of them has experienced a voter fraud scandal that has been found to have affected any electoral outcome since adopting this system.

The Brennan Center for Justice notes that Oregon alone has sent more than 100 million mail-in ballots since adopting all-mail voting in 2000, and has documented only about a dozen proven fraud cases across that entire period, a rate the organization calculates at roughly 0.00001% of all votes cast under the system. A separate Heritage Foundation analysis, an organization that actively compiles and publicizes documented voter fraud cases specifically to highlight the issue, identified only 207 cases of absentee ballot fraud out of 1,277 total voter fraud cases catalogued across decades of American elections nationwide, representing about 16% of all the fraud cases that organization has documented, with the large majority of the remaining cases instead related to in-person voting rather than mail ballots.

Multiple academic studies using quantitative statistical methods specifically designed to detect systematic fraud patterns in recent elections have found no evidence of the scale of fraud that would be required to affect a close statewide or national result. A 2021 peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined the specific statistical claims circulated about mail-ballot fraud in the 2020 election and found that they were either consistent with normal, non-fraudulent election dynamics, such as expected variation in ballot rejection or late counting patterns, or were based on identifiable analytical errors in how the underlying data had been interpreted. Political scientists who study election administration broadly agree, based on this and similar research, that voter fraud of any kind, including mail ballot fraud specifically, is extremely rare in contemporary U.S. elections relative to the total volume of votes cast.

Mail ballots include multiple layered security measures designed specifically to prevent the kind of fraud alleged in popular claims: signature verification against a voter's signature on file with election officials, matching of personal identifying information such as date of birth, tamper-evident envelopes that visibly show if opened before processing, ballot tracking systems that let voters confirm their own ballot was received and counted, and post-election audits that recount samples of ballots to check for discrepancies. The federal penalty for mail ballot fraud is up to five years in prison, a meaningful deterrent layered on top of the physical and procedural security measures.

The most significant recent case of mail ballot fraud actually affecting a real election outcome, the 2018 North Carolina 9th Congressional District race, involved a Republican political operative running an absentee ballot harvesting operation, and it is itself an illustration of the security system working rather than failing: the fraud was detected by election officials and investigators using the existing verification systems, and the state ordered a new election rather than certifying the tainted result, demonstrating that the safeguards built into the mail ballot process are capable of catching fraud when it does occur.

Common claims

• Mail-in voting leads to widespread, systematic fraud.False, fraud rates are documented at less than 0.0001% and no all-mail state has experienced a fraud scandal since adopting the system.
• Signatures on mail ballots are not verified.False, most states use signature matching against voter registration records for every mail ballot.
• The 2020 election mail ballot expansion created large-scale fraud.False, multiple court rulings, audits, and the PNAS study found no evidence of systematic fraud.
• Mail-in voting has fewer security safeguards than in-person voting.Mixed, mail ballots are more vulnerable to certain forms of fraud (coercion, third-party tampering) but have their own multi-layer verification systems.

Evidence hierarchy

All sources

• The False Narrative of Vote-by-Mail FraudBrennan Center for Justice · 2020
• No Evidence for Systematic Voter Fraud: A Guide to Statistical ClaimsProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021
• Debunking the Myth of Voter Fraud in Mail BallotsUCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute · 2020
• Mail Voting Fraud: Data Points to Low Risk and High BenefitsBrookings Institution · 2026
• Amicus Brief on Voter Fraud EvidenceU.S. Supreme Court (election scholar amici) · 2021

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